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TESWiki Style Guideline discussion
This page is my personal dissection of TES Wiki's current style guidelines. Introduction So, here we go. This is gonna be a very long post, but it should hope to cover ALL aspects of the current style guidelines and why they need sorting. Dissection Tone and Language In our current style guidelines, we have a section regarding profanity. This section is unnecessary as no profane language is actually present within any articles. This is because any actual profanity insertion is actually the result of vandalism and isn't relevant in any way to the way an article should be written. The reference about vandalism is completely irrelevant in the style guidelines. The "Manual of Style" is a document detailing the way you write articles on the wiki, it's not a place to tell people how to deal with vandalism. That sort of thing belongs on a blocking policy page, not the style guidelines. The section on attribution is irrelevant. It isn't necessary to tell people not to sign their contributions on articles as nobody actually does this anyway, nor is it relevant to the layout of article pages. The remaining sections are relevant and can be kept, but their length reduced to a small bullet point. These remaining sections would do better under a heading called "Writing Style". Formatting The content referring to emphasis is mostly ok and can be kept, but the only section I disagree with is that on the letter case. IMO, there is no reason to go around the wiki de-capping every single word just for sentence flow. If the wiki wishes to continue de-capping, it may want to consider using more redirects so pointless pipe tricking like dragon armor is replaced with just dragon armor, which is far more preferable to edit. Pipe tricks like the one I mentioned with Dragon Armor should be avoided entirely because it messes with link usage and makes it impossible to find the link on the page without using Ctrl+F, not to mention that it introduces invisible text on the page which can't be seen. Also, with decapping, it actually means the wiki is displaying false information, because many will refer to weapons in its capped form, not in the decapped format (eg One-Handed over one-handed), not to mention that it creates emphasis that it is a One-Handed weapon. In regards to headings, this is mostly fine, but could be condensed into a single bullet point that just states the proper header form and not to change them to some other format. The content referring to hashtags and bullet points is mostly irrelevant to mention in a style guideline since it is already referred to on , so it's redundant. The linking section is very long, but can be cut down to a bullet point regarding how often links should be used. It's not necessary to tell people how to use pipe tricks for disambiguated links, nor tell users about redlinks as these are obvious. If cut down, it should be reduced to simply stating: "Only link to something once in an article. Multiple links make it impossible to read the article and make it harder for editors to edit the page. A second link can be used if the article is very long" This content could be served in multiple areas: * The stuff regarding the use of links would do better within a "Writing Style" heading, as would the stuff regarding emphasis and decapping of text. * The content referring to headings would be better within a "WikiText style" heading.